by Agatha Frost
“I’ve never seen her like this.” Julia resumed her half-hearted sweeping once she had seen her gran was back in her cottage. “What can I do?”
“There’s not a lot you can do that you’re not doing already,” Barker said, resting a soft hand on her back. “For now, I think it’s best they get through this together. They are married, after all, and Dot is a tough enough cookie for both of them.”
Julia nodded, although she wasn’t as sure as her husband that everything would fix itself. Her baking experience told her even the toughest of cookies could snap in two, given enough pressure.
“Where’s Jessie?” Barker asked, lightening his tone as he popped his head through the beaded curtains. “Has she pulled another sickie?”
“I let her finish early. Wasn’t sure if you wanted her to know about Operation PI yet.”
“Ah.” Barker nodded, smiling nervously. “So, that’s why you invited me.”
“I have something to show you.”
“Oh?” Barker winked as he pulled Julia in by the waist. “Sounds ominous.”
Julia chuckled as she pulled away. She abandoned her lacklustre sweeping and walked through the kitchen and out into the small, walled-in yard behind the café.
“Phew!” Barker lifted the lid on the café’s bin, releasing some flies feasting on the leftovers. “Hardly pleasant out here in the middle of summer, is it?”
“It’s good enough for a quiet minute alone in the middle of the day,” Julia replied as she cleared the plastic milk crates off the wooden doors leading down to the hidden basement. “Give me a hand with this.”
They heaved the two heavy wooden doors open, letting the bright sunlight pour into the dusty cellar.
“Should I be worried?” Barker laughed dryly, peering inside. “Last time you wanted to show me something down there, it was a dead body.”
The body had belonged to Evelyn’s daughter Astrid, who vanished from Peridale in 1997, at the age of sixteen. While Evelyn credited Julia for finally bringing Astrid the peace she deserved after two decades hidden below the village, the true credit went to the violent storm that had destroyed the yard’s original wall. The weight of the destruction had cracked the paving slabs, uncovering the long-forgotten cellar. Almost a full two years had passed since Julia helped put the culprits behind Astrid’s murder behind bars, and she hadn’t ventured into it in nearly as long. Back then, the café had been a toyshop with a workshop in the cellar. The case had been so interesting that Barker’s first book had used it for inspiration.
A chill washed over Julia as she stepped onto the concrete floor. In the semi-darkness, she fumbled for the light’s chain. Dust clouded her vision as fresh air and sunlight poured in for the first time in years. Panic bubbled within her, and the shadows in the corners danced. Her fingers closed around the cold metal, and she sighed her relief as the cobweb-covered bulb flickered to life.
“The crime scene cleaners gutted the place,” Julia said, retreating into the warmth of Barker’s embrace as they examined the empty room. “They took all the old workbenches and shelves. I gave the place a once over with some bleach, thinking I could use it for storage.” She glanced into the corner where she had discovered Astrid’s body, the image still fresh in her mind even two years later. “I couldn’t bring myself to use it.”
Barker left Julia’s side and performed a small lap of the room. It took a lot to scare Julia, and while she wasn’t explicitly afraid of the cellar, it unsettled her. She glanced up at the timber frame holding the ceiling up, and even though she knew her café was right above her head, its comforting warmth seemed a million miles away.
“So?” Julia asked, folding her arms across her chest despite the lack of a chill. “What do you think?”
Barker stopped pacing and met Julia’s eyes. “What do I think about what?”
“This.” Julia spread her hands. “If you’re going to become a private investigator, you’ll need an office. You said you couldn’t work at the cottage while we still have company, and even when they leave—”
“If they leave.”
“When they leave,” Julia continued, pursing her lips slightly, “my dining room is off-limits. It’s gone from a writing cave to a nail salon, and it’s not about to become a PI’s office.”
Barker gave the room a more speculative look. His gaze didn’t linger on the corner where a body had sat for twenty years. Julia forced herself to look there, and even though no hint of what had happened down here remained, she couldn’t hold her gaze.
“You’re honestly okay with me doing this, aren’t you?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Because it’s my third career change in as many years.”
“Third time lucky.”
Barker lapped the room again, landing in the middle, right under the dim bulb. A grin covered his face and his eyes sparkled.
“I could put a desk right here,” he said, measuring out the width with his hands before running over to the ample space to the left of the stairs. “And a sofa here for clients.” He moved to the longest wall. “And bookshelves running all down here, to help with the echo. I could even hang some pictures and put down a carpet, or even a wooden floor.”
Barker’s enthusiasm was infectious.
“You can do whatever you want with it,” Julia said, her smile more natural now that she could imagine the space as something other than a murder scene. “I do have some conditions.”
“Naturally.”
“You’ll keep the noise down,” Julia instructed, joining Barker in another turn of the room. “And there’s no waitress service down here. You’ll have to go upstairs like everyone else.”
“Reasonable.”
“Rent is free,” she continued. “It would have only sat empty otherwise, although I will ask for a small contribution to the electricity bill.” She nodded to the light and the already installed plug sockets dotted around the room. “How does that sound?”
“Fair.” Barker stopped pacing, his firm gaze holding Julia in place. “Are you sure about this? Living together and working on top of each other? You know what they say about couples who work together.”
Julia’s had considered this, but she couldn’t imagine it causing a problem between them. Barker had been spending more and more time as a customer in the café since his publishing deal fell apart and it hadn’t been an issue.
“I wouldn’t have offered if I wasn’t sure.”
Barker pulled Julia into a tight bear hug and kissed the top of her head. Even in the dusty cellar, this action soothed her.
“This is actually happening,” Barker said, pulling away to check his watch. “Christie will never believe this. Speaking of which, I’m meeting him at the pub, and s late.”
Julia’s heart dropped to her stomach.
“You’re not coming home with me?”
“Christie suggested we catch up, and I thought it would be a good time to check if I could liaise with the police if our paths ever cross on cases. Rarely happens, but it can’t hurt to ask since I still have good connections there.”
Julia tried to smile, but contemplating going home alone to the chaos awaiting her made the expression fall flat.
“You can tag along if you want?”
She shook her head, the knot in her stomach doubling. Julia loved her father, Katie, and Vinnie to the very marrow of their bones. She would do absolutely anything for them if asked, and she regularly did, but she found it hard to like them as much while they were crammed under her roof. The madness was just about bearable with Barker in her corner, but with her still-fluctuating moods, going home alone after a long day on her feet was the last thing she wanted to do.
“I’ll be fine,” Julia lied, forcing her smile wider. “Have a boy’s night. You deserve it.”
Even though Julia wanted Barker to have a life away from her, she secretly hoped her husband would insist she go with him. He didn’t. They closed up the cellar and went their separate ways af
ter a kiss and cuddle. She half-heartedly attempted to finish cleaning the café, but her mood didn’t cooperate.
“I’ll do it tomorrow,” she whispered as she flicked off the lights, wondering if Katie and Brian’s messiness was rubbing off on her.
Julia drove home as slowly as she could, but before long, she was pulling up in front of Katie’s new car. Vinnie’s screams rang out before she even yanked up the handbrake.
The volume only grew as she walked up the garden path. Crying was part of the fun of having a toddler, and she fully expected a similar phase from her little one, but like everyone kept telling her, ‘It’s easier when it’s your own.’ Vinnie might have been her brother, but her immunity to the frequency of his howling didn’t match that of his parents.
Julia opened the front door and was greeted immediately by a giant mahogany wardrobe. The stench of nail chemicals drifted from the dining room and burnt food from the kitchen. The TV blared in the sitting room, cartoons cranked up, and yet they still couldn’t drown out Vinnie’s lung exercises. Hand still gripping the door handle, Julia lifted her foot to step over the threshold but stopped before letting it touch the doormat.
“No,” she said to herself, pulling the door closed again. “Just … no.”
Julia dashed to her car. She hurtled back to the café before she could worry about if anyone had seen her flee. Without thinking about it, she parked behind Jessie’s yellow Mini Cooper and squeezed down to the red door on the post office side of the alley. A night spent amongst the teenage mess of dirty clothes and takeaway boxes was preferable to hiding in her bedroom with poor Mowgli while the Wellington-Souths continued their takeover. She knocked on the red door and rang the buzzer at the same time, but the door swung open immediately. The knot in Julia’s stomach doubled once again; Jessie was clearly on her way out.
“Mum!” Jessie exclaimed, swinging a patchwork denim rucksack over her shoulder. “What are you doing here?”
“Is it a bad time to suggest a mother and daughter night in?”
Jessie sucked the air through her teeth. “Oh. I was planning on having a brother and sister night with Alfie. We’re going over to Riverswick to check out Thomas’s kickboxing thing.”
“He’s open already?” Julia arched a brow. “His father died two days ago.”
“According to their social media.”
Julia’s inner PI took over once again. She hadn’t been able to glean much useful information from Eugene and Percy concerning who might have an adequate motive to kill Ian, and she would be lying if she said she hadn’t been trying to concoct a way to ‘bump’ into Thomas or Helen to get their side of things.
“Why don’t I tag along?” Julia asked, already heading towards her car, keys in hand. “I’ll drive. Is Alfie meeting us there?”
Jessie grumbled some agreement as she passed her own car. While Jessie deserved quality time alone with her brother as much as Barker deserved a pint in the pub with his friend, for once, Julia was taking the selfish option. She couldn’t face going home, and while she could try to insert herself in her gran’s or sister’s evening, forcing herself into Jessie’s gave her a purpose connected to the murder.
Julia carefully reversed out of the tight alley. Eyes firmly on the rear-view mirror, she spotted a man in a long cream trench coat outside Dot’s cottage, a cigarette in his mouth. Even with her not so great long-distance eyesight, Julia recognised the man as the American.
“I saw him at the pub last night,” Jessie said, also looking into the rear-view mirror. “He was asking around about Ian, and he still wouldn’t give his name.”
“Odd,” Julia mused, eyes switching to her side mirror as she drove away from her café. “Very odd, indeed.”
9
Peridale’s closest neighbour, Riverswick, was a small village less than a ten-minute countryside drive away. For Julia, entering Riverswick always felt like visiting an entirely new world. While the shops and cottages were made from the same golden Cotswold stone ubiquitous in the area, the air somehow smelled – and even tasted – different. Julia wasn’t much of a science-fiction fan, but she had often likened it to entering a parallel universe; it almost felt like entering Oz on the morning of Dot’s wedding.
Riverswick and Peridale shared similarities, but the people walking around weren’t the ones she had spent a lifetime getting to know. She wondered if the gossip channels here were whipping themselves into a frenzy over their unique local drama or had news of Ian’s murder even spread this far out?
“Left at the bottom,” Jessie explained when they turned onto Riverswick’s main shopping street.
While Peridale centred around the green, Riverswick’s founders had put its shops in the village’s heart, with a massive World War I memorial commanding attention from the middle of a small roundabout halfway down the street. The sun was still high in the sky, but since all the shops were closed, life had retreated indoors; the village felt like a ghost town.
“There!” Jessie pointed when Julia turned left at the bottom. “That’s Alfie’s motorbike.”
Julia had never visited this area, but she assumed it was what the locals referred to as ‘the Factory Bottoms.’ Tall, Victorian-era factories loomed over the narrow road, and even though it had been decades since smoke had risen from the tall chimneys, she could still smell their history in the air. She wondered if they had once been wool mills like Peridale’s before a German bomber wiped them out during the Blitz.
The Factory Bottoms had long since been converted, resulting in a more cosmopolitan feel to the short street than the surrounding rural areas would have her expect. The factories had been subdivided into a mixture of flats and shops. One of the largest businesses was a trendy-looking cocktail bar, the River Lounge, which would have felt alien in Peridale. Julia glanced through the big windows as they drove past and noticed it was filled with people closer to Jessie’s age than hers.
She pulled up behind Alfie’s motorbike at the bottom of the strip, outside a less flashy unit with a simple ‘Tommy’s Mixed Martial Arts Studio’ sign above a plain black door. If Julia hadn’t spotted Alfie outside, eyes glued to his phone, she might have driven right past it.
“I wasn’t expecting this to be your thing,” Alfie said to Julia when they parked, “especially considering your condition.”
“I’m only here to spectate.”
“She’s snooping,” Jessie said with a roll of her eyes. “She must think I was born yesterday.”
Jessie led the way through the black door and up a narrow, dark set of stairs. Musty damp lingered in the air, hinting at the actual age of the walls under the crinkled wallpaper. In her head, Julia had already written off the studio, so it shocked her when Jessie opened the door at the top, and bright sunshine blinded her.
“Whoa,” Jessie and Alfie both gasped.
Julia agreed with their sentiment even before she walked into the studio. The old mill roof, made entirely of individual glass windows, flooded the cavernous space with natural light. The white-tiled floor bounced the light right back, making the centuries-old red brick walls glow. Despite the location, the interior felt ultra-modern. The studio comprised a wall for lockers, a wall of vending machines, an area of free-standing boxing bags, and doors leading off to the bathrooms, but the main attraction was the large, bright red boxing ring in the centre of the room.
Two men were already in the ring, and even with a mouthguard blacking out his teeth and a head-guard disguising his face, Julia recognised Thomas, Ian’s son. He was dressed in a baggy sleeveless vest and shorts, similar to the outfit he had worn to the ill-fated meal the day before the wedding. Though it felt as if weeks had passed since that night, it had only been three days.
The other man in the ring with Thomas was younger, a lad around Jessie’s age. He was dressed much the same as Thomas, but where Thomas’s gloves were black, the younger man’s were red, making Julia wonder if the colours differentiated the master from the student.
The
pair stalked each other, cheered on by a trio of ringside teenage lads. The teen with the red gloves dove for Thomas, but even Julia could tell the move was ill-thought-out. In a flash, Thomas had the boy on his back with a thud.
“Not bad,” Thomas announced, taking off his glove to offer a hand to his defeated opponent. “You still need to work on your poker face. I can tell what you’re going to do before you even know you’re going to do it.”
The lad grunted his frustration as he allowed Thomas to help him up, but they shook hands, and there seemed to be no bad feeling between them. Thomas sent the lad on his way before pulling off his headpiece. He squinted in their direction and spat out his mouthguard, a smile taking over his face.
“The Souths,” Thomas said as he bent to pick up a water bottle. “What can I do for you?”
“Taking up your offer,” Jessie said, cracking her neck from side to side. “I need to know how to do whatever you just did to that guy.”
Swigging from his water bottle, Thomas glanced at a large clock on the wall, its hands now inching past six in the evening. “I usually close early on Tuesdays, but I’m sure I can teach the three of you some basics if I hang back half an hour.”
“Two,” Julia corrected. “I’m just here to watch.”
Thomas tossed his water bottle down and wiped the residue from his mouth with the back of his hand. He walked to the edge of the ring, yanked up the bottom rope, and to Julia’s surprise, nodded for her to join him.
“I have a rule here,” Thomas explained. “Nobody leaves this place without at least stepping into the temple.”
“I’m pregnant, remember?” Julia smiled politely, both hands clinging to the strap of her handbag as she took a step back.
“Then I’ll go easy.” Thomas jerked his head again, letting Julia know she didn’t have much choice. “Rules are rules.”
Julia looked to Jessie and Alfie for back up, but evidently, they were too amused to jump to her defence. Not wanting the awkward silence to drag out, Julia shrugged off the handbag and clambered into the ring. Thomas tossed her a pair of beat-up red gloves from a basket in the corner and replaced his own for two flat black pads with white dots on either palm.